Brahma Temple, Khedbrahma

Khedbrahma, a small town at the Triveni Sangam confluence of the Hiranyakshi, Bhimakshi and Kamakshi rivers in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district, is home to one of India’s few dedicated Brahma temples — a distinction it shares with only a small handful of sites nationwide, most famously the Brahma Temple at Pushkar in Rajasthan (also documented in this directory). The two should not be confused for one another: Pushkar’s fame rests on a Puranic legend explaining why Brahma is worshipped almost nowhere else, while Khedbrahma’s temple is a considerably older and far less visited structure whose significance here rests on architectural and art-historical documentation rather than a devotional origin story. According to art historian M. A. Dhaky, the temple was built in the third quarter of the 11th century, around 1060 CE, during the reign of the Chaulukya (Solanki) king Karna — making it, on current evidence, an earlier structure than the core of the Pushkar temple.

Built of white sandstone and cement-covered bricks in the Maru-Gurjara idiom common to Chaulukya-era Gujarat and Rajasthan, the east-facing temple measures roughly 57 feet long, 30 feet broad, and 36 feet high, with a 32-foot-wide sanctum. Its base and wall mouldings are said to resemble those of the temple at Sunak, and the lower registers of the main shrine retain images of gods, goddesses, and apsaras, though these have been unevenly retouched over time; the phansana-style roof, crowned with a ghanta (bell finial), echoes the profile of the Vimala Vasahi temple on Mount Abu. Four octagonal pillars, carved with bells, chains, and kirtimukha (glory-face) bands, were reused from the original mandapa in the present hall. Most distinctively, Brahma is depicted not once but four times at the site: in niches on three sides of the shrine’s exterior, and in the sanctum’s central image — a three-faced, four-armed standing Brahma about 1.8 metres tall, flanked by geese, his traditional vahana.

The temple’s spire, mandapa, and doorway appear to have been damaged and later rebuilt in brick and mortar, and the sanctum’s central Brahma image itself may be a later installation, or an older image whose broken parts were plastered over — a detail the architectural record leaves open rather than settled. The sources checked for this entry do not directly address the temple’s present-day worship schedule or festival calendar, so its status as an actively used shrine is treated here as a reasonable inference from its description as a standing temple at the centre of a living town, rather than as independently confirmed fact.